A political outfit conceived by Republican operatives Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie pulled in more than $2 million from deep-pocketed conservatives and corporations last month, and this week spent $454,000 on ads supporting Republican Rob Portman’s Ohio Senate campaign, according to financial reports filed recently with the Federal Election Commission.

The reports show that the group, a political action committee called American Crossroads, accepted $1 million each from the trust of former Univision chairman Jerry Perenchio and from an agricultural interest controlled in part by Texas billionaire Harold Simmons.

But the FEC reports reveal only half of the effort being waged under the American Crossroads umbrella, which includes the Crossroads PAC and a newer, stealthier group called American Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, or GPS.

Together they have raised $17.6 million through mid-August, spokesman Jonathan Collegio told the Associated Press, though he wouldn’t answer when asked by POLITICO how much was raised by each group.

While reports filed with the FEC and the Internal Revenue Service show that American Crossroads has raised a total of about $6.7 million between its late March creation and the end of July, American Crossroads GPS is not required to regularly report its finances – and won’t be required to reveal its donors at all. That’s because – unlike the original Crossroads, which was initially registered under Section 527 of the IRS code and this month changed its registration to become a PAC – GPS is registered under section 501(c)4 of the IRS code, which allows donors anonymity, but also restricts the aggressiveness of the group’s ads.

Nonetheless, Crossroads GPS announced on Friday that it had launched more than $2 million worth of so-called issue ads criticizing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Missouri democratic Senate candidate Robin Carnahan during their campaigns.

Because those ads don’t explicitly urge viewers to vote against Reid or Carnahan, Crossroads GPS was not required to report them to the FEC.

“Our ads are designed to urge concerned citizens to defend themselves from ObamaCare mandates and prevent the resurrection of the so-called ‘public option,’” Collegio said of the GPS ads in a statement.

American Crossroads’ ads boosting Portman explicitly supported his campaign and, as such, were the subjects of reports to the FEC, which showed that the political action committee paid $440,000 to a Towson, Md., media-buying company to place the ad.

American Crossroads had already spent close to $1 million on ads attacking Reid and Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) during their reelection campaigns, and also recently unveiled a poll suggesting the 2010 mid-term electoral landscape might be volatile enough to give Republicans a chance at capturing the Senate majority from Democrats.

The Crossroads groups, part of a vast effort by political and interest groups on the right to offset the overall financial advantage held by Democrats and their allies, have set an ambitious fundraising goal of between $50 and $60 million.

In their fundraising efforts for the Crossroads groups, Rove and Gillespie have relied on their connections to wealthy donors who supported former President George W. Bush like Simmons, who was a major donor to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which funded controversial ads attacking Democrat John Kerry’s 2004 challenge to Bush. Simmons partly controls another company Southwest Louisiana Land, LLC that gave $1 million to Crossroads before July. Also giving $1 million or more before July was TRT Holdings Inc., which is owned by Robert Rowling, who raised at least $100,000 for Bush.